Two Dreams

Last night I dreamed that I was at a conference in a nice hotel. After lunch, a group of mothers and babies were heading upstairs to rest. We got to a door at the end of a hallway and woman we knew blocked it and shook her head significantly. We turned back and another friend blocked another exit with the warning that "they" were coming for us. Any homebirth mother and homeborn baby needed to leave the building immediately because we were going to be captured. The atmosphere was tense and we held our babies tightly and were really anxious. We finally found a way out through the basement where my aunt was waiting in a "getaway" car to take us to California.

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Two years ago when I was pregnant with my second baby, I dreamed I was walking through a hospital and saw that all the women were laboring in beds with their arms and legs strapped down flat. One woman said, "but I wanted to give birth side-lying" and the nurse then spun her bed around so IT was on its side (perpendicular to the floor) so the woman was now "side lying" in the air strapped to a vertical bed! After I saw this, I started sneaking into all the rooms and unstrapping the women and encouraging them to "be free!"

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I was going to post my personal "analysis" of the meaning of these dreams in the context of our legislative efforts in MO, but then I decided that the symbolism is pretty self-evident without my additional commentary!

Quotes from Birth Book

In the early 70's, Raven Lang was a self-trained midwife in Santa Cruz, CA. She and her sister midwives opened a birth center and served many women before one of the midwives was arrested in an undercover sting operation by a law enforcement couple posing as homebirth clients. Birth Book was the first woman authored, empowerment model, homebirth-oriented book to come out of the childbirth and midwifery movement of the 70's (published even before the better known and also much beloved classic, Spiritual Midwifery). This book has recently been reprinted on a very limited basis and is being sold by Citizens for Midwifery. This week I was delighted to read it at last and I wanted to share some quotes from the introduction of the book that felt relevant to me when thinking about midwifery in Missouri:

“Birth has not only reached the absurdity of having to be relearned, it also has the absurdity of becoming a criminal offense if we are to go ahead with our ideals and do things the way we desire. And so, because of the system, midwifery as practiced in this book is against the law. It has become political. We didn’t make it that way. For us it is a beautiful, personal, spiritual, sexual experience. And for us to have that, we become criminals.”

“None of this would have happened if we had waited for organized medicine to come around, or if we had been scared of the laws we would break, or if we had waited for money. I want now to say POWER TO THE PEOPLE, AND YOU CAN DO IT IF YOU WANT.”

Homebirths to be covered by insurance in New Hampshire!

Both the House and the Senate in New Hampshire have passed bills that mandate insurance companies to cover home births! The two bills were slightly different, so not quite ready for the Governor's signature, but the bills passed by big margins. This is a terrific development for home birth and perhaps and example that will be useful for other states.

Read more about this news here.

This is exciting news for NH and just makes me reflect on what we're working towards here in Missouri--simply the right to skilled midwifery care in our homes. It has been a difficult struggle to get this idea of legal midwifery accepted here in Missouri and so it is a refreshing change to know that in other states not only is home birth "accepted," but is also now covered by insurance! Missouri is falling even more behind the times!